The majority of established authors — traditional, hybrid, or indie — have a website. Here at BookBub, we see that 85-90% of authors selected for Featured Deals have a website for their books.
Why do so many authors choose to invest in a website? Should you? And, if so, how should you do it?
These are the questions this guide to building an author website aims to answer.
Why do you need an author website?
Let’s start with the decision to build a website. A website will cost you time and money that you could spend writing or marketing your books — so why is it worth building one?
Authors choose to make this investment because a website is a powerful, versatile marketing tool that gives them ownership over their online presence and relationship with readers.
An author website can accomplish many different things for you, but a few key functions stand out and create great value:
- A place to collect email addresses to build a mailing list you own. Owning a mailing list allows you to reach your readers directly without relying on social media platforms, which can change their algorithms or policies at any time. A website is one of the best tools you have to build your mailing list.
- A way to establish credibility and professionalism. A well-designed website signals to readers, publishers, the media, and others that you are serious about your craft. It’s a digital business card that builds trust and authority in the literary world.
- A public profile you own and is not subject to platform changes or limitations. Social media platforms can change their rules and algorithms, or even disappear altogether. Having your own website gives you an online space where the content and the reader experience are always under your control.
- A way to get discovered in search engines. A well-optimized website can help you appear in search results when readers are looking for information about you, your books, or related topics. This increases your visibility and can help drive more book sales.
- A place to display all of your books in one place. An author website serves as a central hub where readers can find all of your published works. This makes it easy for your fans to discover other books they may not have known about, encouraging multiple purchases.
- A way to help readers discover retailers where they can purchase books. By linking to various online retailers, your website can guide readers to buy your books wherever they like, whether it’s through online retailers, physical bookstores, or any other place your book is available.
Are there ways to do these things without a website? Of course. You can put up a simple landing page to collect email addresses. You can let your writing and your social media accounts establish your credibility and professionalism.
But none of those substitutes work as well as a website.
A landing page is a quick way to start collecting email addresses, but it does little to help with other important goals like building credibility or driving sales. A profile on a retailer site is easy to set up and maintain, but it limits your visibility to that retailer’s readers and makes you increasingly beholden to that retailer. Social media followers can be extremely valuable — but your relationship with them and access to them exists at the discretion of the platform.
The value of a website is the value of building a flexible, personalized space that you own to serve as the foundation of your author platform and your relationship with readers. It’s not easy to quantify that value — but most authors conclude early in their author journey that it is well worth the effort to invest in a site.
When should you build an author website?
The sooner you create your author website, the better. It’s never too early to start building your mailing list, introducing yourself to readers, and building your credibility as an author.
Many authors create an initial site as they write their first book so their website is already in place when they’re ready to publish. Other authors don’t want to invest time or money in a website while they’re writing or before they have a book to sell. These authors wait to launch their site.
In general, we see authors creating websites at three different stages of their journey:
- While writing their first book: These sites often include a simple landing page where readers can join the author’s mailing list, a short bio, and links to other content the author wants to share, such as links to other writing or publications, photos, or even blog posts. Authors who want to spend a little time on marketing while they’re writing sometimes post excerpts of their work-in-progress or updates on the writing process. This can help start to build an audience for an author’s book before publication.
- Shortly before publication: Another time that authors frequently create a website is during the lead-up to the launch of their book. At this point in their journey, authors who previously didn’t have time to focus on marketing may start posting excerpts of their book, sharing cover art, building their mailing list, and driving preorder sales. By having a website at this stage, authors can make sure their website benefits from and amplifies the attention they generate during their book launch.
- After publication: Some authors don’t feel comfortable investing in a website until they’ve started to generate book sales or revenue. These authors typically create their website when they want to start scaling up their book sales, mailing list, and other marketing efforts.
How much does an author website cost?
No matter how you choose to build your author website, it will require a bit of money and time to set up.
There are two primary financial costs to setting up and maintaining a website:
- Software and hosting: The software is the tool you use to build your website, often a site that you log into to edit your site’s design, enable features, and create content. Hosting means running the computers that store your website and display it to visitors. Software and hosting costs make up the bulk of a website’s financial costs, and vary widely depending on the approach you take. Some authors opt for highly limited free website options, others spend thousands of dollars to design beautiful custom sites, but many choose something in between — most self-serve website creation and hosting services cost $10-30 per month. We outline the tradeoffs of these options in more detail in the next section.
- Domain: The domain is the actual web address where your website lives — for example, www.authorname.com. Domain registration typically costs between $2-15 per year.
The time required to launch your website will also depend on your choice of software and hosting. Some hosted website services can take under an hour to set up, while a site that is custom-built by a designer or agency could take weeks or months.
You should also consider how frequently you’ll want to update your website. How often do you publish new books? Do you plan to add regular content updates like blog posts? More frequent site updates can help attract more traffic and readers, but require a greater time investment.
How do you build an author website?
Most authors choose one of three ways to build their website:
- Limited Free Service: If you’re trying to spend the bare minimum on your site, you may want to consider a free option. There are a handful of different free options, but keep in mind that they all come with limitations. For example, some free services display the hosting company’s ads on your site. Others require significant technical expertise to use.
- Self-Serve Website Builder: These are software platforms that allow you to build a professional-looking site on your own without any technical expertise. Many early-career authors who want to make a small- or medium-sized investment of time and money choose a self-serve website builder. They typically cost between $10 and $30 per month, but many offer free trials. We’ve listed key features to look for during your free trial to make sure the platform you choose fits your needs in the next section.
- Professional Website Designers: These are designers and developers who work with you to create a custom site. A professional designer is a good option if you can spend a little more money on your site and you want something highly customized. A site built by a designer or agency can cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars to set up. Like other options, it will also have an ongoing hosting fee. To hire a professional to build your website, you should start by identifying a handful of designers or agencies within your budget. Set criteria for evaluating them (What is their design process like? Do they have experience creating websites for authors in your genre?), interview each of them, then decide which one you want to move forward with.
Which features should you look for in a website builder?
Here are a few of the most important questions to keep in mind when evaluating a website builder for your author website:
- Is it easy to manage your book information? Book information, including retailer links, book descriptions, and covers, can take a significant amount of time to gather and add to your site. You should pick a platform where this is easy to do, particularly if you plan on frequently publishing new books after you launch your website.
- How can you display a book on the site? Does your website platform offer templates and design tools that make it easy to highlight your books, along with all of the retailer links, reviews, and cover images? Formatting your book details can be challenging if your platform doesn’t have good support for books.
- Is it easy to collect email addresses? Does your platform make it easy to collect email addresses and build a mailing list? This is a key value of an author website and you want to make sure your platform supports it.
- Does your website look good on mobile devices? If you’re researching website-builder options on a desktop computer, don’t forget that many of your readers (on average, more than half, according to Google) will visit your site on a mobile device. Make sure it looks good for those readers.
- Is it easy to update? If it’s difficult to make changes to your site, you probably won’t do it often. That will make the information on your website stale and make your website a less valuable asset overall.
- Are you happy with the look and feel of your website? Make sure you’re happy with your site’s appearance and the way it communicates your author voice.
- Does your website support all the content you want to add? Make a list of the content and features you want on your finished website (A blog? An events page? Videos?). Does your platform support all of them?
What should you include on your author website?
Author websites can include a wide range of content. The content you choose to put on your site depends on your goals and preferences. That said, most author websites include these essential elements:
- Your books: List all your books with covers, descriptions, and purchase links. Reviews are great to include, too.
- An author bio: Introduce yourself to visitors, share your background, give context to your books, and connect to readers on a personal level. Learn how to write a great author bio.
- A mailing list form: Make it easy for your website visitors to sign up for your mailing list, which gives you an opportunity to build a longer-term relationship with them.
- A contact form. Let your readers reach out to you. This is another way to make your site more personal.
- Social media links: Help potential readers stay connected and learn more about you on their social platform of choice.
Of course, these are just the basics. Depending on your interests and the readers you’re trying to attract, you might add richness and a unique voice to your site in many other ways — a blog, author updates, links to writing you’ve done elsewhere, a press kit, a list of events you’re participating in, links to merchandise you’re selling, and more. Let your creative juices flow!
What are examples of great author websites?
Once you decide that you’re ready to build a website, you should spend some time looking at other author websites in your genre for inspiration before you get started. We compiled some of our favorite author-website examples here, and many other blogs also have lists of their favorite author websites.
How do you build traffic for your author website?
Once you’re happy with the content and design of your author website, you should start linking to it from places where readers will find it. Here are a few places you might consider:
- The bio of your social media accounts
- Your author profile on book retailer sites
- The back matter of your ebooks
- Newsletter emails to your readers
- The footer of your personal emails
- Guest blog posts and articles that you write on other sites
Another way to grow traffic to your website is to post new content on your site from time to time, then share links for that content on social media.
Linking to your website from lots of different places will not only give readers an easy way to find your new site, but also make it easier for search engines to find it. This will help your site start to rank in search results, which will help you build more traffic to your site over time.
Website traffic and attention takes time to grow, so don’t expect a flood of website visitors, mailing list signups, or book purchases immediately after you make your site live. The payback for your website will happen over time as you build your audience and awareness.
A final note: Have fun with your website!
As you know, writing is a form of self-expression. Finding a story that you feel passionately about and putting it into words is an enormous amount of work, but it can be a deeply personal, gratifying experience.
If you’re a writer and not a web designer or developer, you probably don’t get that same gratification from website development. But it may help to think of the process through that same lens of self-expression. Your website — the colors, the content, the design, and the language — should reflect who you are as an author. The process of website development is a process of self-expression. Have fun with it!
